The Far Country (38 page)

“You must have been great friends,” the girl said.

“Better than we should have been, maybe,” Mary Nolan said quietly. “But there, it didn’t seem to be no harm at the time, and now it’s a long while ago.”

There was a silence after she said that. Jennifer sat at her feet
hoping that Carl Zlinter wouldn’t come back and break the spell; she felt now that she could ask this old woman anything. She said presently, “Did anybody live in Charlie Zlinter’s cabin after he died?”

The old head shook. “There was people leaving Howqua every day from that time on. Nobody lived in it before I left. There were houses to spare, the way you’d see doors open all along the street.”

“You’re sure of that, are you—that no one lived in it?”

“Nobody lived in it before I went,” she said. “I would have known about it if they had.”

“What happened to all his things? I mean, what
did
happen in the Howqua when a man died like that? Did the police take them?”

Mary Nolan set her cup down. “There was a policeman, Mike Lynch was his name, from County Kerry; he lodged about the middle of Jubilee Parade, but I’m not sure if he was there. I don’t think there was anything in the cabin to trouble with. Early in the morning, the day that he was found in the river, I went to his cabin in Buller Street, because he was back from Banbury. I knew that because I heard him in the dark night singing outside the hotel that Peter Slim kept, and I knew that he was having drink taken. And I thought maybe he’d fallen asleep in his clothes or done himself an injury in the cabin, and so I went out and went to his cabin on the far side of the water before it was light, the way the neighbours wouldn’t see me go. I had done that before sometimes, and cleaned him up and made him breakfast, and taken his clothes home to wash, very early in the morning, so nobody would know. But Glory be to God, the man was dead already and I crossed the bridge that he had fallen from, and never knew.”

Jennifer said, “Did he leave any papers or books in the cabin, Mrs. Williams? Can you remember anything like that?”

“Never a book,” she said. “There wouldn’t have been many books in Howqua at that time. Charlie was no scholar, but he could read labels and that—not the longer words. He did have papers of some sort with him, although he never showed me. He kept them all locked up in a tin box he called his ditty box, not very big.”

The girl asked, “What happened to the box after he was dead? Can you remember that?”

“It wasn’t there,” said Mary Nolan. “I remember looking for it special when I found he wasn’t in the cabin, and his door left open, because I knew he set store by it. Sometimes it stood on a little kind of ledge he’d made in the earth chimney, and other times it wouldn’t be there at all. So when I went into the cabin I looked, but the box was away out of it, and then I looked around a little but I didn’t see it. I didn’t give much heed to it, because it wasn’t always there. I wouldn’t know what happened to that at all.”

“Could he have left it in Banbury?”

“He might. I wouldn’t know at all. It could be that he had it with him when he fell into the river.”

“He had the dog in his arms,” said Jennifer. “He wouldn’t have gone to cross the river with the dog
and
the box too, would he?”

“He was a wild, reckless boy when he had drink taken,” Mary Nolan said. “But there, he had a way with him and a body could deny him nothing. I would not say anything of what he might have done when he had drink taken.”

“What would have happened to the rest of his things?” the girl asked. “Who looked after those?”

“Sure, and there wasn’t very much,” the old lady said. “He was buried in his Sunday suit, they told me. I never went near, because there had been tongues wagging in the Howqua about him and me, and I knew that if any of the women spoke against me I would have flown out at them, and that I would not do at Charlie’s burying. So I stayed in my own cabin all the while, but they told me he was buried in his Sunday clothes. There would have been some working clothes, maybe, but nothing of value, and his wagon and the bullocks. There was a Scots boy worked for him, Jock Robertson; I think he took the wagon and the team. When the working clothes and the harness were gone from the cabin there wouldn’t have been much left, and what there was nobody would want, for all the folks were starting to leave about that time.” She stared at the tinsel flowers in the grate. “I looked into the cabin once, and the bedclothes were still upon the bed, but a possum or a rat had nested there, and the bucket still half full of water, and a loaf of bread still in the cupboard, all gone green with mould.” She shivered a little, and drew the shawl more closely round her. “It’s not good to go back afterwards to places where there has been happiness,” she said. “It tears at your heart. I never went back again, and soon after that I left the Howqua myself. I’d say the cabin stayed like that until the fire came through.”

The girl took one of the old hands and held it in her own. “You must have loved him very much,” she said.

“Whisht,” said the old woman, “there’s a word that you must never use until there’s marrying between you, and Charlie Zlinter was a married man already in his own country. He was a kind, gracious man and I looked after him when he would let me; that’s all there was between us, child. This foreigner that brought you here today and has the same name, is he a married man?”

“No,” said Jennifer. “I asked him that.”

“Maybe you’ll be luckier than I was,” Mary Nolan said. “Maybe he’s telling you the truth of it. The other Charlie Zlinter never told me any lies.”

They sat in silence for a time. The old woman was tiring, and it was evidently nearly time to go. “One last question,” Jennifer said. “Did Charlie Zlinter ever tell you anything about his wife—the wife he had in his own country?”

Mary Nolan shook her head. “He wouldn’t be after telling me the like of that.”

The girl stayed ten minutes longer for politeness; then she said that she would have to go and see how Zlinter was getting on with the car, or they would be late in getting home. She said good-bye to the old woman; Elsie Stevens stepped outside the door with her.

“She had a nice talk with you,” she said. “I haven’t seen her so bright for a long time.”

“I hope I haven’t made her too tired,” the girl said.

“Oh, no. I think it does old people good to have a talk about old times, now and then. It comes easy to them. Did she tell you what you wanted to know?”

Jennifer shook her head. “She couldn’t tell us anything very much—except where he lived. She did tell us that. But she didn’t know anything about him, really.”

“Ah, well, it isn’t easy after all these years.”

She said good-bye to Mrs. Stevens and walked up the lane to the utility; Carl Zlinter was sitting there in it, smoking. “She got talking when you went away, Carl,” she said. “She told me a lot of things, but I don’t know that any of it’s much good to you.”

“Shall we drive out of town, and then stop, and you can tell me what she said?”

“Let’s do that. Let’s go back and stop somewhere by that river, and I’ll tell you all I can remember.”

They drove back over the col where they had lunched, and down to Gaffney’s Creek and to the Goulburn River; presently they parked the car at a place where the river ran near the road, and walked across a strip of pasture to a bend. As they went she told him all about it. “She didn’t know much really that you didn’t know already, Carl,” she said. “There were papers in a box, a tin box, but she doesn’t know what happened to that, or what was in it.” She told him what she had heard from the old woman. “She did look for it particularly that morning, but it wasn’t there.”

“She didn’t know of any other place he might have put it?”

The girl shook her head. “She thought he might have had it with him when he fell into the river—in that case, it’ld be at the bottom of the Howqua.” They walked on for a few steps in silence. “She was so sweet,” Jennifer said quietly, “the way she went out very early to the cabin to find where he was and clean him up. She said she often did that.”

“She must have been very much in love with him, to do that for a drunken man.”

“I think she was,” the girl said. “Yes, I think she was.”

They came to the rocky edge of the river and sat down on a boulder in the shade to watch the water and to talk. The water made a little lilting noise from the run at the end of the pool, a cockatoo screeched now and then in the distance, and the air was fragrant with the clean scent of the gum trees in the summer sun. “She said he lived at Number Fifteen, Buller Street,” Jennifer told him. “Is that enough to tell you where the cabin was?”

He took a folded paper from his breast pocket, and began to spread it out. “What’s that?” she asked.

“It is the township plan that I copied in the Shire Hall,” he said. He stood up, and spread it on the flat boulder that they had been sitting on; she helped him to hold the corners down. The paper was dazzling in the bright sun. He moved his finger down the plan. “Here is Buller Street,” he said. “Here is Fifteen, the number on the block. I think perhaps this was the place.”

She bent to look at the faint pencil lines with him, her head very close to his own. Her hair brushed his cheek and he could smell the fragrance of her skin. “This is Fifteen,” he said, a little unsteadily. “The cabin must have been on this allotment.”

“Could you find the actual place on the ground from this map, Carl? Is there anything left there now to show, that’s marked upon this map?” She stood up, and moved a little away from him; it was difficult for her, also, to be quite so close.

“I think that we could find the place from this,” he said. “Here, this solid marking, this must be the Buller Arms Hotel, and that still shows upon the ground a little. This map is to the scale of two chains to each inch. Perhaps there are other markings left, that Billy Slim will know. I think it will be possible to measure out upon the ground, and find this Block Fifteen in Buller Street.”

“When are you going to do that?”

“I would like to do it tomorrow,” he said. “Would you come with me once more to the Howqua tomorrow?”

She looked at him with laughing eyes. “I don’t know what the Dormans’ll think if I keep going out with you like this, Carl.”

He smiled back at her. “Does that matter very much? You will be going to Melbourne very soon to start your work, and then we shall not go out any more, and the Dormans will be happy.”

“I know.” Mary Nolan had told her that the other Charlie Zlinter had a way with him, and a body could deny him nothing. Perhaps these Charlie Zlinters were all the same. “Of course I’ll come with you, Charlie,” she said, unthinking.

He laughed, and met her eyes, still laughing. “I am not Charlie Zlinter,” he said. “I am Carl, and you are not Mary Nolan. That was fifty years ago. We are much more respectable people than that.”

She laughed with him, flushing a little. “I don’t know why I said that. I’ve been talking about Charlie Zlinter all the afternoon, I suppose.”

“I do not think it is a compliment,” he said. “Charlie Zlinter was a very bad, drunken man, and he was a bullock driver.”

She looked up and met his eyes, still teasing her a little. “Well, what about you?” she asked. “You’re a very bad man, and a lumberman. I don’t see much difference.”

“I am offended,” he announced. “A bullock driver is much lower in the social scale than a lumberman. I would not say that you were like to Mary Nolan. I would not be so rude.”

“I hope you wouldn’t.”

There was a pause; he looked from her across at the little rapids of the river, at the smooth water running to the stones. Then he turned to her again, smiling. “I might have said it,” he remarked. “Mary Nolan was kind to a man who was very far from his own home. I might quite well have said that you were like to Mary Nolan.”

She did not answer that, but dropped her eyes and picked a little piece of clover in the grass that she was sitting on. “Also,” he said, “I think that Charlie Zlinter, although he was not a very good man—he was in love with Mary Nolan. I think perhaps that is another likeness.”

“Lonely people often think that they’re in love, when they aren’t really,” she said quietly. “It must take a long time to be sure you’re properly in love with anybody, and not just lonely.”

“Of course.” He reached out and took her hand and held it in his own hard brown one. “Will we be going to the Howqua tomorrow?” he asked.

She smiled at him. “If you want to, Carl.” More and more like Mary Nolan, she thought, but she could deny him nothing. “If you’re quite sure that it’s safe for a girl so like to Mary Nolan to go back into the Howqua.”

“It is very safe,” he told her. “There is no Charlie here, only a Carl. No bullock driver, only an unregistered doctor full of inhibitions and repressions.”

She laughed, and withdrew her hand. “I wouldn’t put much trust in those,” she replied. She got to her feet. “I’d love to come with you tomorrow, Carl,” she said, “We’ll make it all right with the Dormans, one way or another.”

They began to walk back across the paddock to the car, very near to each other but not touching; to ease the tension she began to question him about the house that he wanted to build in the Howqua valley, how big it was to be, what would it be built of, and how would he get the materials in there. He told her that it would be very small and simple, no more than twelve feet long by ten feet wide; he could afford sawn timber for a house of that description and he thought that he could get everything he needed from the sawmill at Lamirra and get a lorry driver to take it up to Jock McDougall’s paddock on a Saturday; from there Billy Slim could probably get it down for him on a sledge, or he would borrow a horse and a sledge from Billy and shift it himself. He would roof it with tarred felt sheeting of some sort. He thought that he could build it in the week-ends before winter. It would be very simple inside, with just one built-in bunk and a fireplace and a table. “It is all I need,” he said. “Just somewhere to be at the week-ends and to leave fishing rods.”

She said, “And you’re going to build it on the site of Charlie Zlinter’s house?”